Ask Me No More
by Jeitiiea
Summary: Shepard and Vakarian face their final mission. Retirement.


**A/N** \- Well this is what happens when I try to say good-bye to Garrus and Shepard before I start playing Andromeda. This wrote itself in about an hour and I'm sure there will be plenty of stuff once ME:A comes out to invalidate some of it, but... I don't care. This woke my muse up and demanded to be written, and so it was. Hope you enjoy!

* * *

It was some stupid little firefight that did it in the end. There had been thousands of them, over the long years that Shepard and Vakarian had been partnered together. The first handful of years might have been the most intense, what with the Reaper Invasion and a galaxy-wide war, but there had been more than enough combat in the past decade or two to keep them busy.

It was amazing how much trouble a pair of Council Spectre's could get themselves into over the years.

They'd never talked seriously about doing anything else. Occasionally Shepard would throw out some joke about taking themselves off to a beach somewhere and collecting seashells, but this was their life. They were soldiers, and damned good ones. Soldiers kept going, until they couldn't.

Sometimes, on those dark nights when they'd received word an old friend had been killed or hurt, Garrus and Shepard would face up to the likelihood that they'd die in battle one day. Watch each other die, bloody and gasping. They'd cling to each other a little harder, their kisses would be edged with a frantic passion. But in the morning, they'd pull on the familiar armor and strap on the guns and go out to make the galaxy a safer place.

It's what they did.

Until they didn't.

Later on, Vakarian would have to admit he couldn't even remember the name of the planet. Somewhere in Hades Nexus, maybe... or was it the Attican Traverse? Some dank little mudball, with gravity that dragged at their heels, and air like soup. They were facing off against a nasty bunch of mercenaries that had been leading a particularly brutal pirate and slavery ring in the neighborhood. They'd eventually pushed too hard and the Council had taken notice.

Spectre's Shepard and Vakarian had been sent to deal with the issue. It was always the two of them. It had been made clear to the Council, when Garrus was appointed Spectre status after the war, that they were a team. There would be no solo missions.

There's no Shepard without Vakarian, after all.

They had earned their reputation, but this group was well established. They'd dug in, they had provisions, weapons and more mechs than any decent merc group should have access to. It meant a covert operation, infiltrating and planting explosives around the base. They'd planned it to take advantage of the explosive nature of the ammunition already on site. It was always going to be a challenge, but it was do-able.

Something went sideways. Something _always_ went sideways. They'd spend years afterwards fondly arguing over which one of them screwed up and alerted the enemy to their presence. Which one had turned a quiet little in-and-out job into a ferocious fight for their lives.

They were pinned down in a loading bay, a sniper on the catwalk above taking potshots at them anytime they raised their head above cover. A line of mercs had spread out to flank them and it was looking pretty grim.

That was the moment when Garrus looked at his wife and saw something _change_.

She was crouched behind a pile of crates, leaning heavily on her left leg because her right knee had been blown away by an unlucky shot - the prosthetic one, the replacement they'd given her after the medics pulled her out from the rubble of the Citadel with her real leg so mangled it couldn't be saved. Another victim of the Reaper War. Shepard's face was drawn, smears of dirt and blood trailing across one cheek, and her eyes... They looked at him with a hollow emptiness he hadn't seen since just after Thessia, all those years ago.

"Garrus." Her voice was calm, and her hands were busy slamming another clip of ammo into her rifle. "Garrus, I don't want to do this anymore."

He looked at her then, against the backdrop of yet another messy firefight, and saw the aching tension in every line of her body. The desperate, burning _exhaustion_ that said she had reached her limit. Shepard was done. She'd given her life, her leg, and too damn many years to fighting in the name of peace. And now she was done.

Vakarian had met her eyes and nodded and proceeded to fight beside her one last time as they cleared the mercs, and blew the base to hell.

* * *

It was Shepard who informed the Council they were retiring their Spectre status. Shepard who turned down the countless offers from Systems Alliance and independent groups trying to lure her into service, offering strategy and tactics jobs rather than frontline combat, trying to woo her with ridiculous pay checks for short term consultancy contracts. Garrus got the offers too; he just deleted them without reading them.

They'd earned more than enough over the years that they could have lived a quiet life of relative luxury for the rest of their days. Their apartment on the Citadel - Anderson's old apartment - was the only home they'd known for the past few years. They'd spent years here together. The memories were carved into every wall, every piece of furniture, every photo.

But as Garrus watched Shepard retreat more and more in the face of unceasing pressure for her to take up arms again, he knew they had to go. As long as they were here, as long as they were visible, there would never be peace. Someone would always come knocking at their door, begging them to help out with some little problem or other. Eventually Shepard would say yes. It would be Tali, or Miranda, or maybe Wrex asking for some backup. Shepard could never turn them down, and Garrus couldn't bear to see that look in her eyes ever again.

That hopeless, empty look, the one that said ' _I can't do this anymore_.'

So he went looking for options. While Shepard spent her days trying to adapt to civilian life while fending off job offers, Garrus undertook his final mission: finding them a future.

It had to be far away. Out of sight. Somewhere they could stop being Commander Shepard and Spectre Vakarian. Somewhere they could just be _them_. Somewhere they could live without putting their lives at risk, where they only picked up a gun at the range. Somewhere that maybe, one day, could be safe enough for them to think about adopting a third party into the family.

Vakarian had been thinking of her tropical fantasy, angling for some out of the way little moon or world at the far edge of nowhere. What he found was exactly what he wanted... and more than he could ever have expected.

 _"Join the Third Wave Arcs to Andromeda! Help us build our home in the Golden Worlds of the Helius Cluster."_

It was a random little piece of advertising that some VI program had tagged as being of potential interest to him. Garrus pulled the full promo and ran it on repeat a few times. Andromeda. It sounded familiar, but it took a few minutes to remember why.

He'd heard about it years back. After Saren was defeated, maybe just after he'd gotten word of the Normandy SR-1s destruction and Shepard's death. Even out on Omega, there'd been a small rush of interest, a flurry of news reports as the Andromeda Initiative launched its first wave of arcs to cold sleep their way to a distant galaxy. At the time, Garrus had thought they were lunatics.

Hell. That first wave of ships still had hundreds of years to go before they reached their destination. A brand new galaxy. No idea what was waiting out there.

 _A brand new galaxy. A fresh start._

It stuck in his head. Garrus should have laughed the idea off and kept hunting for some nice, lonely retirement planet. Instead he sent off a request to the Andromeda Initiative for more information on the application process.

It was ridiculous. They couldn't just dive into a cold sleep capsule for hundreds of years and leave everything they knew and loved behind. They couldn't risk everything on the fragile hope that there might be something out there waiting for them when they woke up.

When the data pack arrived from the Initiative, Garrus found himself sitting at the desk in the study, staring at the early specs of the Golden Worlds in uncertain hope. Was he crazy? Was this something Shepard would ever want to-

"What's that?"

She still sounded tired, but there was a gleam in her eyes that had been missing for weeks. Shepard moved closer, leaning over his shoulder to peer at the screen.

"A crazy idea," he answered.

There was a long moment of silence as she read the briefing over his shoulder. Shepard didn't laugh, didn't slap him on the shoulder and walk away. Garrus drew in a careful breath and flicked forward through the data file, calling up the briefing on the Golden Worlds.

There were 7 of them. One of them was tropical. He figured she'd like that. But it was the passing glance of rolling hills that made her straighten.

"It looks like Mindoir."

Garrus felt his mandibles tilt in relief. Crazy idea or not, his instincts had been on the money. Shepard had never let them go to Mindoir, she hadn't wanted to go back. But she still spoke about it, sometimes. With a quiet regret, and the distant hint of longing.

"How crazy are you feeling these days, Shepard?"

When he turned the chair to look up at her, she was smiling. The lines of tension that had been pulling at her mouth were gone and it was the kind of smile he hadn't seen in too damn long.

Shepard dropped herself into his lap, curling up against his chest with the familiarity of long years together and pressed her lips to his mandible.

"Pretty damn crazy, big guy."

And that was it. The tension bled from her with every kiss, and her lips tasted of relief and hope.

Vakarian carried his wife upstairs to their bed, telling her to shut her damn mouth because he was still _more than capable_ of carrying some measly human female up a single flight of stairs, and didn't she remember that he'd faced down Reapers, Collectors, Leviathans and every other damn thing the galaxy had to offer without doing any sort of permanent damage?

She was laughing when he laid her down and undressed her, and it made his heart race to hear that sound again. All her laughter had been brittle lately.

"Well, since we've apparently done everything the Milky Way can send our way, let's see what Andromeda has on offer," Shepard purred by his ear as she stripped away his shirt.

The damn woman could _still_ make him go weak in the knees and he was just relieved they were already lying down.

Garrus propped himself onto his elbows, her soft naked human skin pressed against him in ways that were so achingly familiar. His hands framed her face, seeing again in memory what she had looked like that first time. So young, so serious. All the lines and scars that met his gaze now... he'd been there with her for all of that.

He wanted to see her face grow old. To see those lines deepen and groove, the way human skin did with age. Garrus would give everything in his power for them to know there were more years ahead than behind; to know that their deaths would be natural and peaceful.

Spirits. Above all, to know that he wouldn't have to watch her die bloody and screaming and know it was because he didn't get there in time to save her.

Shaking the old fears aside, Garrus dipped his head to nuzzle along her throat. Indulging himself in the blissful, _sinful_ sound of her ragged gasp.

"It's about time Alison Gunn and Archangel had another adventure," he murmured by her ear.

Garrus could feel her pause. It didn't distract him from the job at hand and he gave a satisfied purr when he drew more happy noises from her. Shepard would know as well as he did that the galaxy wouldn't let them vanish. Not forever. If those two names showed up on an application form for something like this Andromeda Initiative, someone would know. Someone would block it.

But once they were safely tucked into cryo beds crossing deep space between galaxies, nothing could stop them. By the time they woke up again, everyone... everything they'd ever fought and that had ever tried to kill them... would be dead. They'd be free.

Shepard met his eyes, and there was no turning away in them. She had never chosen the safe road before and she wouldn't start now. She met him head on here, as she did with everything, and her smile was the wonder of the universe.

"I love you, Garrus Vakarian."

He tried for a cocky response, of course he did. But then she _moved_ and did that _thing_ and he was trembling above her and trying to remember how to breathe.

"Dammit Shepard. Always stealing my thunder."

But she laughed and met him kiss for kiss, touch for touch, and it didn't matter who said what because they were saying it for both of them. Even when neither of them could form words at all.

* * *

They didn't tell many people what they planned. Just the old crew, the survivors from the war. Shepard wanted a party, wanted another damned group photo to take with them and he didn't know how to deny her anything.

So it was them and the old crew, the ones who were still kicking. Miranda thought they were crazy. Tali was in tears the whole night and Alenko didn't seem far off it. At the end of the night, Wrex confessed if he'd known about it earlier, he'd have tried to join them.

Liara refused to speak to either of them for days.

When she finally showed up, her eyes were red and her voice low. Someone - probably Kaidan - had clearly reminded her that they were leaving forever and if she didn't get over her anger about it, she'd lose the chance to say good-bye.

That was the only time he saw Shepard cry when saying good-bye. To be completely honest, Garrus had come pretty damn close himself.

"I understand why you're doing it," Liara said to them before she left. It was the day before the third wave arcs would be departing the Milky Way, and she'd cut it close to see them at all.

"We'll miss you too, Li," Garrus told her softly.

Then she was gone, everyone was gone, and it was just them.

Just Shepard and Vakarian, whatever names they might have to wear for a while, staring at each other across the living room of an apartment they'd called home for a dozen years.

Garrus watched her settle into the reality of it all, watched her let the sadness of the good byes move past her. Watched with growing gratitude as she turned to him with clear eyes and an easy smile and held out her hand.

"Let's do this, big guy."

There would be a future for them and it wouldn't be battle and blood and pain and death. It wouldn't be constant struggle, fighting the endless tide of enemies and faceless merc groups, the aching pain of pushing your own body as it became harder and harder to keep functioning at the level necessary to stay alive.

Instead, there would be peace. There would be quiet days and laughter, there would be nights to wrap around each other and relax into the moment. There would be no looming threat always on the horizon. They could leave the guns locked up until it was time for a day at the range. Because there would always be guns. But there didn't need to be battle.

It wouldn't be Mindoir but it might be close.


End file.
